Any tv show where they have an cast of teenagers who act way too mature for their age.
Riverdale/Legacies/13 reasons why/Pretty little liars/The fosters etc etc. Feel like I'm watching a show about 30 year olds in 15-18 year old bodies
Always cracks me up. You see these grown ass adults closing in 30s arguing about 14 yo drama. Or when the dialogue are so overly complicated and deep, bruh, it's high school.
Honestly, watched Young Royals the other day and learned that I prefer 30 year olds playing high schoolers… turns out when they cast actual teenagers, they still write sex scenes, but now during the sex scenes I feel uncomfortable as fuck cuz there are children having sex on screen…
Most of the actors are 18-19 now, but obviously they didn’t film right before it came out, so I’d assume they were a bit younger during filming. It’s a Swedish show so idk their laws lol
The fosters was pretty good at casting age appropriate, the kids were all only slightly older than they played(the guy playing Jesus was supposed to be 18 but was played by a 20 year old; Jude and Connor were supposed to be 13 but were played by a 14 and 15 year old).
It's way more realistic than someone claiming to be half their age which always feels really creepy(way too much focus on dating or body changes for a 25-30 year old actor to not feel like it's just trying to justify a sex scene with an actor/actress playing a teenager).
To be fair I’ve learned this the hard way but a lot of people look the same as teenagers as they do in their mid to late 0s if they never bulked up or gone bald.
Ugh I am over the whole “High School Drama” bullshit that is in nearly every. Single. Fantasy show I want to watch. Like can’t I just see cool fairies and mythological creatures and magic without suffering through teenage drama? I want mature magic and the whole “magical school” setting has been worn to threads.
i don't understand why they can't all be in college at least? the actors are all 25-30 anyways and it's laughing bad. Who looked at Ben Mckenzie looked like a 15 year old on the OC? Who thought the actor who plays Paxton looks 16 on Never Have I Ever? The whole cast of 13RW looks mid 20s in the first season.
I really don't understand why aside from Greek, Community and Undeclared is so underutilized for settings.
Most likely it's because they're trying to appeal to viewers who are in high school/recently finished high school. So it's trying to be more relatable to them.
I get that. But there’s lots of people that are in college that are looking for things to watch and be relatable for them. There’s also a whole market that people are looking for that’s like 22-early 30s, which is like the new self discovery stage that has emerged and there isn’t a lot of stuff that fill this. And that’s probably why a lot of the younger millennials still read YA and are stuck watching high school dramas.
I mean if you have no problem with anime (as opposed to live-action) and have no problem with witchcraft and wizadry I'd suggest ya Little Witch Academia.
Fun little anime about a "normal" person that goes to knockoff Hogwarts where everyone else was born in families with a story of wizardry and ends up being friends with her roommates all while trying to be like her witch idol.
Story is laid-back, cartoon style self-contained plots for the first season (ie reviving a pirate by pure accident, flying broom race, magical (but not mythology) creatures going on strike for example) while the second one has a pretty decent attempt at focusing more on plot.
The Magicians has a grad school setting and it is mostly driven by plot and not character drama. It's very good imo and is a great deconstruction of the whole "bunch of magic kids" trope and millennial culture in general.
I was really hyped to see a dresden files tv show after i got into the books only to be severely disappointed it was turned into some buddy cop thing and theyd changed a bunch of shit like making bob evil instead of just lacking morals.
Like you have an amazing story already written for you just transcribe it to tv and you'll hit a gold mine dont change it just because.
Aww but I actually liked Bob in the tv show. The actor who played him was really good and he seemed to be some sort of father figure for Harry.
Of course, I love Bob in the books too. He's funny. But I've always thought Harry was too isolated in his daily life, even with his friends that pop up every case. He's a guy who desperately needed someone to guide him and be human to him on the regular. And not in a distant way like Ebenezar did.
The TV show was mediocre but mediocre in the same vein as the first couple of books so I thought it kind of fit. Wouldn't have held up for the later books though. But Bob was the one thing that I thought they improved.
That’s why I loved the magicians on sci-fi. It was a bunch of people getting their masters in magic and it worked so well. Like finally the sexual innuendo and drinking wasn’t portrayed by people pretending to be 16. Made it much less creepy and more enjoyable.
Years ago MTV created a show about the book series Shannara Chronicles. That goddamn show had so much potential and they fucking butchered it by making it into a show about one guys quest to fuck every woman he meets. I was so pissed.
Hey thanks for having sex with me I’m going to become a tree now so you can go fuck the other model without any moral obligation to me. Also I’m an elf and these leather pants and top are all but crotch less.
There's a couple good ones, but they all seem to be grittier. I liked Carnival Row and The Nevers, both based in Victoria-era England-ish which is a sweet spot for me personally, but it's hard to find anything based in modern times that doesn't come across as pre teen garbage.
Sorry to come out of nowhere with this but I have to recommend this to anyone at any given opportunity because I just love it so much:
If you like stories in a Victorian-era setting, then give Victoriocity a try. It's an audio drama available for free on any podcast app, set in steampunk Victorian London. It's a detective buddy comedy mystery with stellar production, voice acting, and world building. It pretty much sounds exactly like if you closed your eyes while watching a tv show. The characters are great and the mysteries are fun. There's 2 seasons out with 6-8 episodes each. It's one of the best things I discovered during the pandemic.
If you haven’t seen it yet, Penny Dreadful on Netflix is absolutely amazing. It crosses a lot of classic stories/horror themes - vampires and werewolves, Dorian Gray and Frankenstein’s monster - with mystery arcs and magic. The costumes and sets are really good, too.
Honestly I kinda blame stuff like Buffy the vampire slayer and Harry Potter. Or at least their popularity inspiring others to try and replicate their success.
You know what really bugs me about Riverdale? That it pretends to be Archie. Other than the names of the characters, the show bears no relation to the comics whatsoever.
Is Hollywood really so scared to make something new that they have to shoehorn preexisting IP into a completely unrelated show? It'd be farcical if it wasn't so pathetic. Change the names, and no one would have any idea they were watching Archie and Jughead, and there'd be no impetus to try (however half-heartedly) to pass off a Samoan as a redhead, or dye Cole Sprouse's famously blond hair jet black.
It's based on the Road to Riverdale graphic novels (darker and modern) so the show is actually based on Archie comics. Just not the ones we grew up reading.
My girlfriend watches secret life and it's fucking awful. Kids getting married, pregnant, sleeping with teachers... Shit like that doesn't happen every two seconds to the same people in the same school.
I constantly tell my wife this. "Why are these 14 year olds having articulate adult conversations about adult issues?" Its a little uncomfortable to watch and a little cringe
Me and my friends have conversations about "adult issues" mostly in fear of the bullshit our generation is gonna have to fix, or because we all needa vent
I feel like Dawson's Creek was the granddaddy of these shows. 90210 had 30+ year-old actors cast as teenagers, but the dialogue in Dawson's Creek made them sound way too mature.
I had that problem with Frida Night Lights. Seems like all of these highschool kids lives alone. Also, there was a part where some travelling business dude strikes up a relationship with Adrianne Palicki's character. I don't think she was even a senior in highschool at that point.
I won’t accept Legacies slander. It’s actually a pretty good show and clever with some of its episodes. At times it has moments of brilliance like Supernatural. Really the only thing holding it back is forced romance drama and poor musical selections. But it generally subverts a lot of the expectations of those types of shows with its characters. Well, except the main character. She is kind of a cliche but at least the show constantly points out how she’s a cliche with some characters flat out hating that she’s the so called chosen one.
I love that in every show about teenagers there's always a local bar they just hang out in. Writers just don't know what else to do, so they pretend the hottest club in town makes their money selling 18 year old's soda.
Watching Outerbanks, no way a young teenager is able to have those comebacks to the town Sheriff when she's informing him of fostercare! And that rich girl is only 16?!
I started watching Shadow and Bone but had to turn it off as it switched to "she's just mean to you because she's jealous" trope. I don't need angsty teens in my fantasy stories.
In a similar way---movies and shows that portray people from different eras with the extremely advanced views of that time. Basically anything with Keira Knightly. Fuck that bitch. She can only play one role.
It's like they watched anime and never realized this shit works/appeals to people because it's not real and the medium allows the showriters to just do shit like that because it's not real and is a medium that works a lot on expressing emotions in over the top ways. When they put it in teen shows? I just want the writers to step down.
My wife and I tried watching Vampire Diaries once and couldn't make it past the second episode because of all the "supposed to be in high school but clearly in their late 20's" actors. Which I guess is the opposite issue from having teen actors acting like 30-year olds, but my point stands.
Agreed! I especially hate when they have graphic intimacy scenes. Like, I understand that the actors are all of age, but I feel so uncomfortable watching “high schoolers” be intimate.
I watched the first season of outerbanks thinking it was college kids. At one point the mom tells Wriarh hes 16 and needs to start acting like it. Was honestly pretty funny, I got got pretty good.
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u/OctoGuppy 27d ago
Any tv show where they have an cast of teenagers who act way too mature for their age. Riverdale/Legacies/13 reasons why/Pretty little liars/The fosters etc etc. Feel like I'm watching a show about 30 year olds in 15-18 year old bodies